How does homeopathy work?
Dilute a remedy 1 in 100, shake it, and repeat thirty times. Count the molecules with Avogadro's number, watch them run out at 12C, find out why 30C would need 10¹⁵ oceans to hold one, then run a fair test against a dummy pill.
▶ Play with it · Read the 60-second explainer · Watch the 40-second video
- A gentler medicine, from 1790. Samuel Hahnemann took cinchona bark while healthy, felt fever-like symptoms, and built homeopathy on it. Around 1800 doctors bled patients and gave mercury purges, so gentle remedies caught on, and homeopathy reached India in the 1830s.
- Like cures like, as homeopathy describes it. Homeopathy teaches that a substance that causes symptoms in a healthy person, found in "provings", treats similar symptoms in the sick. A long consultation matches one remedy to the whole person, in the smallest dose.
- Dilute and shake until nothing is left. Each C step is 1 part in 100 with hard shaking. A mole holds 6.022 × 10²³ molecules, so by 12C most bottles hold none, and 30C would need about 10¹⁵ Earth oceans to hold one. "Water memory" failed blinded tests.
- From plant to sugar pill. A mother tincture is plant material soaked in alcohol. Insoluble things are ground with milk sugar. Drops of the dilution are soaked into sugar globules, and a repertory links symptoms to remedies.
- What fair tests show. Many people get better anyway, and people visit healers on their worst days. Randomised, blinded trials compare with a dummy pill. Australia's NHMRC found no condition with reliable evidence it beats placebo; homeopaths and India's CCRH dispute this.
- Use it wisely. The pills themselves carry little risk; delaying real treatment does. Never stop prescribed medicine, see a qualified doctor for serious illness, and keep vaccines up to date. Many choose homeopathy to feel heard: an Indian GP visit averages about 2 minutes.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Homeopathy | A system of medicine founded by Samuel Hahnemann around 1796, built on "like cures like" and highly diluted remedies. |
| Similia similibus curentur | "Let like be cured by like": homeopathy's principle that what causes symptoms in the healthy treats them in the sick. |
| Proving | A test in which healthy volunteers take a substance and record their symptoms. |
| Potentisation | Repeated dilution with vigorous shaking (succussion). 30C means 1 part in 10⁶⁰. |
| Avogadro's number | 6.022 × 10²³, the number of particles in one mole of a substance. |
| Mother tincture (Ø) | The starting liquid for a plant remedy: plant material soaked in alcohol and filtered. |
| Repertory | An index of symptoms, each listing the remedies linked to it. |
| Placebo | A dummy treatment. Fair tests compare a remedy with one to see if it adds anything. |
| Regression to the mean | After an unusually bad day, the next ones tend to be closer to normal, with or without treatment. |
From a German doctor's dose of bark in 1790 to one of India's official systems of medicine, tested along the way by chemistry and clinical trials.
- 1790 · The cinchona bark experiment (Samuel Hahnemann, Leipzig, Saxony)
- 1810 · The Organon (Samuel Hahnemann, Dresden)
- 1829 · Honigberger at the Lahore court (Johann Martin Honigberger, Lahore, Sikh Empire)
- 1881 · The Calcutta Homoeopathic Medical College (P. C. Majumdar and D. N. Roy, Calcutta (Kolkata))
- 1973 · Homoeopathy Central Council Act (Parliament of India, New Delhi)
- 1988 · "Water memory" in Nature (Jacques Benveniste's laboratory, Clamart)
- 2005 · The Lancet's big comparison (Aijing Shang, Matthias Egger and colleagues, Bern)
- 2015 · Australia's NHMRC review (National Health and Medical Research Council, Canberra)
The full story, with 30 moments, charts, people and 31 sources: glassbox.how/e/homeopathyclear/history. The data lives in history.json.
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